Chapter 7

The white faded away, and No_Idea found himself standing on the sidewalk outside of the building they’d just been in. N3V3RDIE was a few feet away. The safe zone beam was still shining in the sky, barely closer than it had been when they were on the rooftop.

“What was that?” he asked. “That weird white light—and the words?”

“We leveled up,” she said. “We’re in The Streets now. One level down, three to go.”

He frowned. I can’t believe we’ve only gotten through one level so far.

“We used more stamina than we should have,” he pointed out. “We should use a max of twenty-five percent on each level. We’ve already used twenty-nine.”

It took him a moment to realize that N3V3RDIE wasn’t responding to him. He turned to look at her and saw that she was keeping her gaze on her sneakers.

“What’s wrong—”

“I used thirty-two percent,” she said. No_Idea looked at the bar in the top right of his vision. She was right, only 68% left.

“We need to be more careful,” he said.

Her gaze snapped up at that, and N3V3RDIE narrowed her eyes at him. “I know that.” She cleared her throat. “We need more supplies,” she said. “Any kind of tools we can use. Let’s look around.”

They searched the area outside of the building for any glowing objects. No_Idea was too distracted by their dropping stamina levels to focus on finding anything, but after a few minutes of searching, he heard N3V3RDIE shout, “Nice!” He turned to see her pull something out of a trash can.

“What did you find?” he asked. She held something large and rectangular with a window in the middle.

“What is that?” No_Idea asked.

“This,” she said, poking her head over the top of it, “is a riot shield.”

No_Idea shrugged. “Is that good?”

“These things are bulletproof. No zombie is going to tear its way through this!”

“So what? What are we going to do with it?”

She grinned. “We’re going to bash our way through the rest of this game.”